CMAT review: Cork splits the difference as Dunboyne Diana steals moment at Musgrave Park
CMAT lights up the stage with a high-energy performance at Virgin Media Park, Cork. Picture: Chani Anderson
Cork is split in two on Saturday night.
At Páirc Uí Chaoimh, Zach Bryan is pulling in tens of thousands for the first of two sold-out shows; across the city at Musgrave Park (Virgin Media Park), CMAT’s crowd is smaller but no less committed - and considerably more glittered.
The queue alone is a spectacle: joyful, eclectic and a little bit bonkers, with headpieces, pompoms and cowboy hats creating a carnival feel.
CMAT doesn’t so much play a stage as commandeer it. Born Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, the Dunboyne woman has built a reputation as one of the most flawless live performers on the circuit right now. She is part heartbreak balladeer, part stand-up comedian, part one-woman variety show. Her soaring vocals wrapped in a level of camp somehow pulls a few thousand strangers into the same orbit. She picks out one young boy at the the front who looks like he's ready to swoon at her awesomeness.
Behind her is the self-styled “Very Sexy CMAT Band”, and the name undersells nothing. They are tight, joyful and clearly having the time of their lives, linedancing away, smooching each other, and sliding effortlessly between authentic country twang and pop-rock muscle depending on the tune.
CMAT fills the stage in red, white, and a tartan top and skirt, and headscarf which she pulls off dramatically for Take A Sexy Picture. They open with Tree Six Foive and from there takes the crowd on a tour of the hits — The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station, Rent, No More Virgos - but it’s the prementioned radio-friendly Take a Sexy Picture that really dials things up.
The singalong moments land exactly where they should, with the crowd moving as one, they do the butcher, they do the baker, they do the home and the family maker. She keeps everything balanced on a knife-edge between heartbreak and hilarity.
Her banter is top class: "It's great to be here in the true capital. Cork has something noone else has, specifically the butter museum in Shandon."
The lady does her research. She tells us this city has been good to her, she's been gigging in Cork since she was 17. A besotted lady in the crowd gave her a hat, made by her daughter Rosie, in Australia, and she was properly touched. Another throws a bra, and she seems touched, in a different way.
CMAT has never been shy about speaking her mind on stage, whether it’s Irish housing, corrupt politicians, genocide or women’s rights. She starts a 'Free Palestine' chant, and the crowd roars along with that as loudly as it does the choruses.
The venue shines too, big enough for the singalongs, intimate enough that every line still lands, and somehow personal even at scale, the same trick she’s pulled off at the O2 Brixton Academy and Dublin’s 3Arena.
For all the cowboy-disco energy, there’s room to breathe too, when she dips into her more emotional material and the crowd leans in for the quieter moments.
Two stadium-sized country shows, one Cork weekend. A city long divided north and south now drawing a new line, boots and ballads echoing across both sides of the Lee. But while one was about scale, the other was about something harder to manufacture. Zach Bryan had the numbers, but CMAT had the moment.
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